Sunday, 7th of August, 2011

Evening all! Many musics for you tonight, on that night of all nights – MasterChef final! ahahahaha sorry… Anyway. Regardless of absurd and frighteningly absorbing reality TV, tonight is an aural degustation</tie-in>
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Discovery of the week is the amazing Downliners Sekt, who remixed the wonderful y0t0 on his new album. All their releases are available for free from their website, and range from stunning minimal post-dubstep beats with r’n’b-cut-ups to heavy dubstep and dubby postrock, and bits of droney stuff thrown in. Pretty amazing.
And speaking of y0t0, the Uriarra Road album’s still getting plenty of listning time round here. I’ve raved about it enough in previous updates, but enjoy the detail in the quiet sections of the non-remix track… And meanwhile Germany’s Field Rotation conveniently segues us from y0t0 into Vieo Abiungo, with a stunning remix of what’s already the highlight of his forthcoming new album — the title track, and the world is still yawning.
The remix album is pretty special, but so is the album proper – available for pre-order now from Lost Tribe Sound. I thought we should do a compare-and-contrast, and the wonderful Benoît Pioulard presents the perfect example, totally turning it into Pioulard-land, but somehow keeping a core of the original in there.

And so to the surprising new album from Sole & the SkyRider Band. William Ryan Fritch, he of Vieo Abiungo, is a member of the SkyRider band, who have been working with Sole for a few albums now. His amazing strings grace some of the tracks here, but what’s more unusual is the vocoder and other tilting towards a more mainstream hip-hop sensibility in some areas. This despite collaborations with the likes of Xiu Xiu. It’s a fascinating album and a real success.

A reprise of the brilliant Sun Hammer remix of James Blake from a week or two ago, and then we’re back into Downliners Sekt. Negative Green is one of those songs that grips you (if you’re me) so that you need to go back and listen to it as soon as it’s finished. It’s the way it builds and evolves, while the head-nodding crunchy beat keeps the flow. I’m a fan. From 2008 we heard a couple of tracks more in the dubby post-rock vein — this is a band that takes pride in its stylistic twists and turns.

A lot’s been said about the stylistic shift of the new Prurient album, but I’d like to suggest that it’s not as far from his noise output as suggested. He’s always based his sound around synths and drum machines, along with his vocals. There’s a fair bit of screaming on the new album, as well as pitched-down incantation. It’s certainly got more drum machines and song structures about it, and less unrelenting noise, but it’s not totally out of the blue.
If you can see (hear?) past the “extreme” nature of his output, there’s a lot to get out of Prurient’s back-catalogue too.

German label Ad Noiseam continues to put out heavy-hitting releases in breakcore, dubstep, drum’n’bass and dark ambient. Among the recent releases is the new one from hard d’n’b king The Teknoist, and it opens with a pretty spot-on remix of a µ-Ziq track from 2003’s Bilious Paths. It doesn’t stray far from the original, but adds an additional layer of pummeling beats and shiny synths.
Later we hear one of those tracks where dubstep meets drum’n’bass, and in between, Greece’s Mobthrow do pretty much the same thing. I’m surprised that I don’t seem to have played their dubsteppy remix of an old Future Sound of London track either, from 2009’s Mutant Dubstep Volume 3, seeing as I’m a huge FSOL fan, but there you go, never got around to it at the time.

One of my favourite Japanese artists, Himuro Yoshiteru, is on a roll at the moment. His latest album just crept up on me, and it’s digital-only, from Bedroom Research. As usual, bright melodies brush shoulders with drum’n’bass and slinky hip-hop beats, plus the occasional hint of dubstep. Fun!

But on the d’n’b tip, it’s now time to hear from drill’n’bass pioneer Animals on Wheels aka Andrew Coleman. His early releases were much celebrated in the idm scene in the mid-’90s, and I still remember the fuss that track “Hate Me” caused (I love it). He’s currently releasing 8 EPs in 8 Weeks, and tonight we heard one new track from the 2nd EP, plus a few older tunes, including a lovely piece from his Thrill Jockey, when he’d move away from the mad drum programming and into something resembling proto-folktronica.

Some local stuff to finish. Cycle~ 440 are a duo from Perth and combine almost-classical/almost-jazz piano with ring modulators, noise and glitchy crackles on their debut EP available from Bandcamp.
Then I felt the need to play you a couple of absolutely gorgeous unreleased Part Timer tracks, which appeared in his live set in Sydney last week — must get him to release these! Maybe time for Bandcamp eh, John?
And finally, another cut from the fantastic Muted Angels album from Brisbane’s Tom Hall. Highly recommended.

Labels and artists!

email: utilityfog at frogworth dot com
Utility Fog teeters on the cusp between acoustic and electronic, organic and digital. Constantly changing and rearranging, this aural cloud of nanotech consumes genres and spits them out in new forms. Whether cataloguing the jungle resurgence, tracking the ups and downs of noise and drone, or unearthing the remnants of glitch and folktronica, all is contextualised within artist & genre histories for a fulfilling sonic journey.
Since all these genre names are already pretty ridiculous, we thought we'd coin a new one. So "postfolkrocktronica" it is. Wear it.